


All We Shall Know For Truth

by MoonlitCastle



Category: Holby City
Genre: F/F, Not Canon Compliant, Substance Abuse
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-10-19
Updated: 2017-12-11
Packaged: 2019-01-20 00:59:16
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 6,588
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12421731
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MoonlitCastle/pseuds/MoonlitCastle
Summary: It's AU. It features AA. AA AU, on AAU. Will that do?Rated Mature for later chapters. Features various types of substance abuse.Non-canon compliant in various respects (such as the amount of substance abuse!).Thank you @MidLifeLez for the beta on Chapters 1 and 2.





	1. The Wisdom to Know the Difference

What is it they say? That in those very final moments, your whole life passes before your eyes.

Short of a successful séance, if you believe in such things – and Bernie, a true scientist as well as a soldier at heart, and having reviewed the available evidence, does not – then it isn’t possible, of course to ask the dead whether or not this is really the case. This observation has, it seems, been made by those who _nearly died_.

And thanks to her unwelcome encounter with an IED in Afghanistan, Bernie comfortably – sometimes, painfully – fits into that category.

_So it’s true_ , she thinks, as the truck triggers the device hidden in the dirt track, and at once there is noise, pressure, movement, a surging, blinding flash, and the loudest sound she has ever heard, so loud it is felt as well as heard, she could swear it was the sound that was the force that threw her up into the air, images flying through her mind like an old VHS on fast forward: her childhood, the house in the country, her mother going to hospital and never coming back, her father’s closed study door. Cricket in the garden with her brothers, real bat and homemade wickets. A smashed greenhouse window, for which Toby had taken the blame. Out of sequence: her mother’s shampoo, the light in her hair, the tang of homemade peach jam. The lines on her grandmother’s face. _Mummy’s gone to heaven._ Bernie’s father smashing up all of those jam jars save one, salvaged from amidst the wreckage. Kept hidden in her room, in drawers her father never touched.

Medical school. Dusty lecture hall. Too hot in summer. Too cold in winter. Anatomy classes. The first dead body. Because Bernie hadn’t seen her mum, she didn’t go to her funeral. Her grandparents, who organised it all, didn’t think the children should be there. She’d gone to school instead that day, bloodied her nose somehow. A fall? A fight? Here, her memory failed her, only the metallic taste of her own blood on her face, that was all the fragment held.

A junior doctor. The trials and travails. The (rarer) triumphs. That first time she made a mistake and someone else paid the price, and then, days later, that first time she was the reason someone else got another chance. All weighed in the scales, perhaps, if not in heaven - another claimed concept for which hard evidence was sorely lacking, Bernie had declared to Marcus over drinks - then on this earth.

She hits the earth, now, hard. She is not in the vehicle anymore, but it, or some of it, at least, is somewhere nearby: a wheel is spinning. The ground had rushed up, hit her fully, body and soul. The pain, like the noise and the light, was everywhere at once.

_Is this what I deserve?_

The images roll on. Doing her rounds, staring at a patient’s chart, wondering if Mrs Napier didn’t need that specialist consult after all, and the words suddenly swimming before her, and the bile in the back of her throat, making it to the ladies’ just in time to bring up everything from the day: all the scrambled eggs, the bacon too, even the coffee. She knew, immediately, her body was its own barometer, it was telling her how things were, and she had been worrying, anyway, somewhere far back in the depths of her mind, about just this, because she had not been careful enough. Well, she and Marcus, she supposed, but she blamed herself: she had wanted to, _wha_ t, prove something? About herself? Prove a _negative_?

Upstairs in that ramshackle shared house, in the tiny bathroom with the ugly, cracked tiles, the test, of course, proved positive.

Back in the dirt, Helmand sun nearly as bright as the bomb blast had been. A voice, saying her name. “Yes, I can hear you,” she tries to say, but her throat feels cracked, her lips part and only a gasp comes out.

 

~~~~~~~~

Guy Self doesn’t even really want to have a drink today. 

That’s true, in fact, of most days - even those, and they’re the majority, that he does end up cracking open or uncorking a bottle, or upon which he finds himself sitting at a bar. Or, as has begun to occur of late (for reasons he can’t exactly pin down - the sort of obscured motivations he perhaps should talk to a therapist about, if he could find a therapist he could stand to see more than once) stepping away from the ward during his scheduled working hours to wander, look around him, stop and sip from his hip flask, somewhere private and unobserved in a hospital that is a maze of quiet corridors. So many places in which to get lost.

No, it isn’t really that he wants to drink, not most of the time. It’s simply that for whatever reason – sometimes, it seems, very little reason at all – he _does._ And if any of his colleagues have noticed the slight shake in his hands from time to time, his unfocused gaze, the tell-tale sourness of his breath — then they have, as yet, remained silent, and he has gone unchallenged. 

Today is the day that that will change. Today is the day that quite a few things will change, and not just for Guy Self, although Guy, and others at Holby, don’t know it just yet.   

Guy had woken that morning to an illuminated mobile phone screen. Not his alarm, on which he had sit snooze with a spiralling sense of rage some six or seven times and finally switched off with a muttered curse an hour earlier, but instead, a missive from a woman he doesn’t particularly enjoy spending time with, and whom he isn’t sure he trusts, who has drawn a sharp, distinct line under their brief relationship with a brusque text signed off with a single kiss, not two hours after he had left her warm bed, to go home and pass out in his own 

Although his feelings for Julia were mixed at best, although he has been dumped as many times as he has been the one to do the dumping, the brisk and brutal efficiency of the message, the manner in which he has been dismissed, is nevertheless unsettling. Guy reaches out for the vodka bottle by the bed, clasps it around the neck and lifts, expecting weight that isn’t present; it swings too freely. It is empty. _Huh._

He must have finished it earlier that morning before climbing under the covers, apparently still in his shirt and loosened tie. His hand loosens, the bottle falls from his grasp, hits the wooden floor and rolls, somewhere under the bed. _With the others._

The room swims a little, but begins to stream slowly into a sort of fuggy focus as Guy persists in his attempts to perceive it. _There._ Across the room, there’s a half empty bottle of whisky. He swings one leg out of the bed, feels the floor rise up a little. The walls spin and shift, disconcerting, familiar.

The eternal question: is he hungover, or is he _still drunk_?

Guy had drunk, of course, as a medical student. It was almost on the syllabus. Contemporaries had been dosing themselves up with purloined drugs, had got high on their own medical supplies. He had shaken his head, bought another round, his drug of choice available on every corner by going directly into the corner shop and buying it. Legal, taxed; in a manner that is all above board, he drinks most people under the table. He drank at the end of a particularly stressful day, and _everyone does that_ ; it was practically part of a professional’s routine. Show up on time, put a shift in, show what you could do, go home and have a glass of red. But that customary glass of wine had become two, then half a bottle at a time, and then a spirits-based nightcap before bed every night. Minor personal life disappointments, everyday work challenges, all were washed away, washed down, washed out. Guy drank when work had been stressful. Then, he drank what it hadn’t. Then, he drank when he hadn’t been to work. Then, he drank before he went.

There were ebbs and flows to one’s late middle-age, Guy told himself, watching his daughter both blossom and suffer; fall in love, yes, but with a man who didn’t deserve her. Conversation with imaginary therapist: _yes, you’re right, Ollie Valentine does remind me of myself, at that age, at every age, that’s one reason I loathe him so much. One reason I consider him totally unsuitable for the incredible daughter I hardly deserve. But only one._

Yes, age brought the ability to _bear it all_ with a sense of sad acceptance, grim resignation, wry humour, but there was no denying, life’s horizons had palpably narrowed. _Carpe diem_ was no longer a battle cry to seize the day as a stepping stone to a better future, but meant just what it said: grab _that particular day_ by the neck, the horns, whatever other body part of a demon that one could set one’s hand upon and grasp for long enough to make some kind of a difference. Excelling as a senior surgeon was one way to seize the day, true. So was spending the afternoon sitting in one’s back garden with a bottle by one’s side, ignoring texts from one’s daughter, letting calls go to voicemail, finally turning the phone off. Drowned sorrows, Guy thought, drowned… what was the noun for a _happy_? Was there even one?

The very thought of alcohol stirs a sick feeling right now. After all, Guy has never liked the taste of booze, in any form. Not fine wine (which Julia had preferred), not triple-distilled whisky (a gift from Zosia at Christmas, the blend that stands on the desk across the room half-empty or half-full, depending on your worldview), and not the thrown-together attempts at cocktails on Happy Hour at the Copa Cabana [sic] club, where Guy will be an hour from now, because after just going ahead and drinking anyway ( _why do you do that, Guy?_ Asks the imaginary therapist. _If I knew that, would I be in imaginary therapy?_ Guy fires back, at someone who doesn’t exist), after downing his first couple of shots of the day directly from the bottle, it seems like a great place to spend an hour or so before he is meant to be back at the hospital.

The day before, a patient who had very good odds of living had lost the roll of the dice. The surgery that by all rights should have worked, had failed. The patient was young, early twenties, a student at one of the universities, and he expected the parents who had dashed across the country to their only child’s bedside to lash out in angry grief, but they hadn’t even come close to assigning blame. They’d thanked Guy for doing his best, and if he is honest, Guy knows he probably did in fact do the best he could, even if he had been a little bit hung-over throughout the procedure. He’s not yet, he tells himself, reached the point where the alcohol is impeding his work.

He’s right. Alcohol hadn’t impeded his work yesterday.

But today? _Today_ is the day it will.

 


	2. Special Treatment

Elinor is leaning against the front door to her mother’s house, experiencing at least partial, blessed relief from the tremendous pressure of standing fully upright, when said door suddenly swings open from the inside.

“Ellie!” her mother exclaims, as Elinor avoids landing in a heap on the doormat by grabbing the elbow of the frowning, staring young man who is standing alongside her mother. Ellie doesn’t recognise him, but then again, he seems familiar. And he can’t be, she realises as she regains some form of basic balance, if not poise, much older than Elinor herself is.

 _Good god_. Surely not! She hopes the chap has come around to fix her mother’s satellite television, or internet connection, or something like that. He could be some techy sort, couldn’t he? He sort of looks it. Surely her mother can’t be having some kind of _bizarre_ , cougar-ish midlife crisis?!

“To what do we owe the pleasure?” Serena now asks, inclining her head and smoothing an apparent crease in the lapel of Elinor’s jacket but not, Elinor determines, looking at her very closely. No proper examination is carried out. Serena doesn’t register the significant dilation in her daughter’s pupils, or her raised heart rate. Ellie thinks that the pounding of the pulse in her neck should be visible, even unmissable; but her mother, the qualified doctor, experienced surgeon, actual literal lifesaver, apparently hasn’t noticed anything untoward. The diagnosis goes unmade.

Elinor’s mildly curious as to who the waif-slash-stray hanging around her mother and included in the “we” is, but she’s tired, dog tired, and she suddenly thinks the concept of a glass of something liquid, and clambering into bed, is the greatest fucking thing she has ever heard. She’d only taken one pill, as it turned out, but because Danny wasn’t there, she had had to get it from some guy pointed out to her from across the other side of the old warehouse, whose name was Sam, or something, she couldn’t exactly hear, amidst the pumping beats and seemingly audible swirling strobe lights of the highly ironic, retro, early 90s-themed “rave”, and whilst when she got over there she could confirm that yeah, he was cute, soft brown eyes, soft low voice, he had clearly been dipping into his own product or something, because he was out of it. So, she got the pills cheap but she wasn’t sure about them, didn’t recognise the symbol, decided, after all, to be responsible, to just take the one, which was just as well, as it turned out to be way stronger than she was used to; it was some proper, as they say, bad shit. For one thing, it took her legs out from under her, without warning. Maybe there was a little K mixed in there or something. She felt up, but not exactly happy, and then she wasn’t sure if it was speed rather than ecstasy after all. Typical. Outside the venue, in the cold, not wanting to go back inside, really, she thought how her mum’s house was only fifteen minutes’ walk away; she knew a short cut, and it was much closer than halls, or her dad’s. She could go and crash, hopefully not burn, and just sleep it off.

Elinor had calculated on her mother being at work. She usually was, after all. She also, usually, had something in her bathroom cupboard that she wouldn’t miss, that Ellie could use for a downer.

But instead, Serena is right here. And, well, maybe —

“I’ve got to go to the hospital —“ Serena says, and her daughter doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry. She lifts her fingers to her suddenly throbbing temple.

And then Elinor’s mother places a hand on her daughter’s shoulder, for the very briefest of moments, and despite everything, Ellie feels that gentle calm that her mother is capable of exuding, the reassurance she can give to others going through something. For Serena herself, Elinor knows, has been through some things, too.

That’s when it could have happened, Elinor will think, later. Right there and then, by the front door, with what turns out to be her long-lost half-cousin (I mean, really. How excited is she supposed to get about a  _half_ - _cousin_?) looking on.

Did she really come here because it was the nearest place, because she thought her mother would be out, because she knew that here there would be, at very least, that time-honoured downer available on thousands of street corners from a dealer who stands behind a counter and pays his taxes too: alcohol, which in her mother’s home is free and copiously-provided and right there for the taking behind more than one cupboard door?

Maybe. But then again, maybe not.

How can Elinor find the words to say that she found her way here because a part of her, at least, wanted to find her mother home. That some bit of her even wishes Serena would see something is wrong, would see  _her_ , at long last; that she might make a fuss, even sweep her only daughter up in a maternal embrace, usher her upstairs, and bring her medicinal helpings of tea and toast and hot soup and tell her never mind, no real harm done, it will all be better soon.

To even, yes, ask the questions. _The_ questions. Why are you on the doorstep? Maybe, sure, Ellie won’t tell the truth. But sometimes, she thinks, sometimes she would maybe like the chance.

And what else might a mother ask?

Where have you been? Who have you been with? What have you taken?

What have you  _done_?

A voice.

“I thought Mr Hanssen said that he still can’t find Mr Self, and you should get there as soon as possible? It’s just that you’ve already used several minutes on  _doing your hair_ , even though it really does look exactly the same as before you started.”

Ellie looks at the familiar, not-familiar bloke. If he knows he is interrupting a mother-daughter moment, he doesn’t seem to recognise it. Mind you, neither does her mother. Serena glances at the young man, giving the briefest nod of acknowledgment, and moves her hand, lifts her fingers, from her daughter’s shoulder, to the latch on the door.

As her touch fades away: _sometimes I miss you, Mum_ , Ellie thinks.

And there’s a choice, whether to utter the words aloud, to issue them forth into her mother’s neatly-kept hallway, with its familiar scent of home, its same old table with the just-as-old telephone, the elephant paperweight Ellie broke in half (an accident) and her dad glued back together, and if Serena ever noticed then she never said. The photos of Elinor herself, at different ages of childhood, framed on the wall; but then, none of the woman she has become.

 _I miss you_.

The words hover, form a shape in Ellie’s mind; but they don’t reach her lips, and are lost, and as the door opens, for a second time, by Serena’s hand, whatever spell this house and the unexpected sight of her mother actually present in it had cast on Ellie, is instantly broken. 

 _What was all that sentimental shit about??_ _She thinks._ Maybe it had been an X she had taken, after all? Stupid fucking pill. She will kill Danny when she sees him next, if the “man flu” hasn’t beaten her to it: for not showing up, for making her resort to some randomer and his dodgy product.

And so it is that another possible moment between Serena and her daughter, like so many others, passes by. This, then, is not the day that either of them will seize.

“Oh, this is Jason,” Serena says briskly, as they leave. “No time now to explain. I’ll introduce you two properly later on. Okay?”

“Later,” Ellie echoes the single word, as the door closes, and her mother goes to work. _As always._

Ellie shrugs, makes physical how much she doesn’t care, even though there is no-one except old Jasper to see. She makes for the kitchen. There will be wine, vodka. Maybe a biscuit, if she can face eating. Except for quiet mewing from the ancient tabby as he wraps himself around her legs, puts his paws down on her own feet, begs for a little pet (Ellie was always his favourite Campbell), the house is silent.

Elinor pats Jasper on his head. He purrs in an over-the-top manner. Good old Jasper. Probably doesn’t realise how old he is, that he should have had enough of being around by now.

She finds the vodka in the cupboard, already open; experience tells her it likely won’t be noticed if she has a couple of shots. That settles it. Elinor takes a glass from the draining board, pours a measure she guesses will be enough to settle her, at least for now, and goes upstairs, tracked all the way up by a moggy who really has no idea his age is so advanced.

The instant she lies down on her old bed, any consciousness Ellie still possessed begins to leave her, as Jasper curls up comfortably in the crook of her back. And as she drifts off, she thinks:  _I could have scripted it._ Because _you know what_ _?_

She would, after all, have to be admitted as a bloody _patient_ at _Holby sodding City_ in order to get any  _actual_  attention from _Ms Serena Campbell_.

 

~~~~~~~~

 

They say, don’t they, that when soldiers are near death, lying prone on the battlefield and either waiting or begging for the end, depending on their state, that they cry out for their mothers.

Do they still do that, Bernie wonders, in the age of modern surgery and medical wonders, of air support? Bernie’s mother is, of course, very long dead. It might make sense to cry out for a Wildcat helicopter to get her out of here. But she wants to cry out for her children. She wants to cry out, _as_ a mother. But no sound comes out.

“Bernie?”

Alex. She feels Alex working on her, not in the way she has been doing in Bernie’s private quarters for the last two years, of course, but, _ha_ — _really?_

_I’m near-death and I can manage sardonic humour in my inner monologue…?_

A good sign, or bad? Bernie couldn’t say, even if she could speak. So long in the armed forces, and yet, she personally hasn’t been so close to death before. Well, at least, not her own. She feels her clothes being cut away somewhere important. Yes. That seems the right treatment. All those private jokes between them about Alex “just” being an anaesthetist and not a surgeon, and now, Alex is saving Bernie’s life, as Bernie finds all she can do is think about what her life has been. And what it hasn’t.

Cameron, Charlotte. She’s spent so long away from them, she’s been in a different country, a different continent, so often, and for such great swathes of time, and sometimes she feels she doesn’t know her own children, but they are always in her mind. At the back, perhaps, it’s true, but isn’t that for the best? Didn’t she think, after all, that it was better for them that she wasn’t the one front and centre for them growing up? _It’s me in the firing line on the home front_ , Marcus would say. But hadn’t she thought she was doing them a favour?

She had been sick as all hell in the hospital toilets (later, she buys the cleaner chocolate and flowers), and she knew what it was. Self-diagnosed, correctly. Doctor, what’s the treatment? _Physician, heal thyself._ Bernie had read all the literature about what could be done to fix this. Turned pages. Wrote down the number to call and book the appointment, but she knew, somehow, that even with her career ahead of her, the misogyny she knew she would have to fight, the expectations she was both fulfilling and disappointing, with all her army plans – she knew she wouldn’t go through with the abortion.

She couldn’t explain it. She had always thought, if it came to it, that she would decide differently. She had been, of course, on pro-choice marches, had swung the placards wildly, and meant it, and would never, ever change her views. But then again, perhaps, after all, there was no contradiction. Every baby a wanted baby; that was quite right. And she had wanted this one. Surprise spanner in the works, she loved him as soon as she knew of him. She married Marcus because she felt it was the right thing to do, and they made a life together, they had a daughter they had planned, decided upon, and loved. Marcus was truly delighted with a daughter and Bernie found herself so happy, relieved, somehow, that for everything else she had got wrong over the years, she had at least given her husband Charley, who he adored, and was adored by in return. But Cameron? Cameron was Bernie’s “happy accident.” That was what Cameron called himself; irrepressibly clever; he had worked out for himself as a child from the dates of his parents’ marriage, and his birth, that he had been brought about by his parents’ own error in dates, but seemed totally untroubled by this news. He laughed, teased them, was always a happy boy. Until he wasn’t. It wasn’t that start in life that had finally started him with the depression and the drinking, Bernie thought.

Was it?

“Bernie, we’re going to move you,” Alex says. “You’re going to be okay.”

Am I? Bernie wonders, as they lift her up and onto the stretcher. She thinks of Cameron and of all those appointments: with the therapist, the psychiatrist. The addiction counsellor. Of telling him just the same. _You’re going to be okay._

It’s what you say, isn’t it?

And: “I love you”, which comes as a whisper, words Bernie isn’t sure she is remembering rather than hearing now as Alex lowers her lips to Bernie’s ear, and then she's moving impossibly skywards.

You’ll be okay. I love you. Things she has said, and sometimes meant. Are her senses failing her, at last?

Perhaps the words are just shadows of memories, after all.


	3. Coming Up Empty

Alex has, as a personal rule, tended to avoid getting involved with married women. She’d had an affair with one before, years ago, when she was still in her twenties; had got her heart firmly and permanently broken — or so she had thought — and, she told herself, had learnt her lesson. 

But then she met Bernie Wolfe.

When she had first heard Bernie was married, she had imagined the wife that the major must have waiting for her back at home. _No,_ she had thought, _not “waiting”_ — _working,_ a professional, Alex decided. Accomplished at her job, but more domestic than Bernie was, and more organised, spending more time looking after the house, making it a home, and caring for their kids whilst maintaining a career. Bernie, though, was the ambitious one ( _ambitious_ wasn’t quite the right word, though, Alex considered, and neither was _workaholic._ Bernie was consumed by her career, and yet clearly sustained by it, to a degree in both regards that Alex had never previously encountered, and found was a characteristic she couldn’t name).

As it turned out, Alex had the measure of Bernie’s spouse fairly well — except for the crucial fact that Marcus, of course, was not a woman. In fact, when Bernie had first said the words “my husband”, Alex had nearly choked on her sparkling mineral water.

“Not having a beer, Dawson?”

It had been the first time Alex had really seen it: that sparkle in Bernie’s deep brown eyes. Was it the alcohol? — that Bernie was drinking, of course; not Alex. _Natural charm_ , Alex would decide, already feeling something beginning to happen between them, from near the start of that first real conversation. 

“Eleven years sober,” Alex had told Bernie.

It was easier, she had found, to get it out of the way, right at the beginning; to come out as alcoholic the first time someone queried her abstemiousness, or when booze habits came up in conversation. It was similar to, but not quite the same as, coming out as gay the first time someone asked about a husband, or a boyfriend, or enquired about her “status”; and often, the reaction she received reminded her of those early days of disclosing her sexuality — things had changed so much in recent years — the raised eyebrows, the break in eye contact, the other person trying to think how best to react, the concentration in doing so visible in their expression.

“Good for you,” Bernie had said at last, glancing at her whisky glass, and then not touching it again for the rest of the evening.

A better reaction than most, Alex had thought, and none of the _questions._ Such as, “Why did you drink?” And “Why did you stop?”

_Why do we breathe?_ Alex thought. _Why do we, all, or most of us, get up every morning and do anything at all?_ The answer, she knew, was the same to all such enquiries. _Because we must._ She had had to drink, or she would have died. She had had to stop, or, well. The same.

Alex’s father had been an alcoholic. He hid it reasonably well. Whilst he drank every day, he worked nearly every day, too, and it was only when he collapsed in his office with advanced cirrhosis of the liver that his employers realised the extent his problem. Alex had known. Her mother, too. But her brother hadn’t seen it, and had stood bewildered at their father’s hospital bed, Alex remembered, asking how it could have happened.

Alex hadn’t felt she needed to tell herself she wouldn’t end up the same way as her dad. She didn’t see how she could wind up behaving like that, drinking secretly, drinking even in the morning. It was ridiculous, she had thought, until she found herself doing the same thing. She had decided her strength of character meant she had escaped the same fate, until, of course, she fully embraced her destiny; her genetic legacy, perhaps it was. But there was a difference, Unlike her father, Alex had quit, for good. It wasn’t the only way she differed from the father whom in many ways she so much resembled, in looks and in manner, because unlike her dad — and her mum, for that matter — she had a job she loved. And a person she loved too.

Bernie. Now. _Always._

“You’re going to be okay,” Alex tells Bernie, as the blood spreads across her lover’s chest, and she realises at once just how seriously injured Bernie is. It’s what you have to say, of course, it’s what you _do_ say; but Bernie’s wounds are devastating, Alex knows, and Bernie might not be coming back from this. Only the best surgery can save her ( _and even then_ … She stops the thought there. She won’t think it….) But the best surgeon Alex knows, by far, is Bernie herself. There is no-one else in their medical unit with her skill. She will have to go home, and quickly.

A dread that has rested at the back of Alex’s mind for the two years of their relationship is pushing its way to the front of her consciousness and threatening to overwhelm her: the fear of the loss of her beloved. But Alex flicks a switch in her head, a skill she learnt in her early days in the army and which she finds she can use even when it’s her beautiful Bernie who needs her attention, not personal but medical, now. Alex takes the immediate action necessary to save Bernie’s life, stem the blood loss, to stave off death and yes, the thoughts of the same. She works as accurately and carefully as she would on any colleague, on a person she wasn’t hopelessly in love with, on a person whose bed in her private quarters she didn’t wake up in that morning, and then they take Bernie away in the helicopter, as they must, because there is nothing more Alex can do, and Alex stays on the ground, because, what is she?

Bernie’s colleague, Bernie’s comrade, Bernie’s friend; they’re not married (Bernie is married to someone else...), Alex is the _bit on the side_ , she’s, the, what, _mistress_? Not even a girlfriend, not officially, not officially anything at all except a fellow professional, because they are, officially, very much not allowed to be together, and everything between them has been secret, illicit, against the rules; and so she has no right to be at Bernie’s side unless they’re working together, treating a patient. Or unless Bernie is the patient, and Alex is the medic, and Alex is trying to stop Bernie bleeding to death. Well, yes, unless that too. In these circumstances, in a matter of literal life and death, it’s okay for Alex to touch Bernie closely, to put her hands on the other woman not in loving tenderness, like they had shared last night, but to try to stop Bernie from dying at the side of some godforsaken road to nowhere in Afghanistan.  

A helicopter at close range makes a deafening sound. It’s only after it’s out of sight that Alex hears the words: “ _oh God, oh Jesus, oh God_ ”, and it takes her a few moments to realise she is the one saying them. She is speaking without thinking, for her composure has left her when Bernie did, when they took her away. Alex looks down at her hands. They are trembling. And covered in Bernie’s blood.

At that moment, Alex thought it was the bomb blast that might take Bernie from her; but that the very best surgery, back in the UK (she doesn’t think of it as “home”), might bring the woman she loved back.

She doesn’t know then, of course, that Holby will indeed finish the work of saving Bernie that Alex had started; but that it will also take Bernie from her, and for good.

 

~~~~~~~~

 

“Do you know what my favourite James Bond film is?” Jason asks, as Serena turns the key in ignition of the near-useless heap of junk masquerading as a vehicle that is her car, and silently offers a prayer up for the blasted thing to start, to whichever deity will listen — Hephaestus, perhaps? God of iron and metal...

Who was the god of travel, again?

“Thank you,  _Hermes_ ,” Serena murmurs, as the name occurs to her when the engine miraculously sputters into life. 

“That’s not a Bond film,” Jason says. “That would be a very strange title, but then I suppose some of the titles are quite weird anyway. I mean, Octopussy? It sounds like —“

Serena casts as much of a sideways glance as responsible driving will allow. 

“— a cat with eight tails,” Jason finishes. “No, my favourite film is The Spy Who Loved Me. Do you know why?”

Serena can’t say she does.

“Because the primary antagonist has an underwater lair,” Jason tells her. “And I would like one of my own. Stromberg also hates humanity and wants to start a nuclear war, but that doesn’t interest me so much.”

Serena nods vaguely. She isn’t really clued up on Bond films. Edward used to like them, or more to the point, she thinks, he liked lounging around on the sofa on a bank holiday watching television, but she’s never quite got into them herself. People keep telling her to try the new ones with _what’s his name_ in. Thingy. The blond chap. He’s got a lovely wife, as she recalls. But judging by the racket she can hear from his room when Jason watches them, they feature lots of crashes and bangs and things blowing up, and really sound far too exhausting to sit through.

That said...

“I did always have a soft spot for Timothy Dalton.” 

Out of the corner of her eye, Serena can see that Jason has adopted an aghast expression. “The films featuring Timothy Dalton are generally regarded as some of the weakest in the series...”  
  
This prompts a five-minute monologue about the respective merits of various Bond actors, allowing Serena to tune out and to turn her mind instead to the matter of the emergency call-in she’s responding to, and what lies ahead at work.

They’re expecting an injured soldier, apparently, airlifted in from some war zone or other, sounds like he might not make it, poor chap, and Guy Self has decided to go walkabout. No doubt he would stroll in to save the day at the last minute, Henrik had mused aloud, but could Serena step into the breach on a couple of less serious procedures that were well within her skillset? That would mean that when Guy finally did turn up, he could fully focus on what was expected to be a highly complicated case, and likely to take all his time for the rest of the day. 

Had she been summoned to make up the numbers at some wretched board meeting, Serena would have insisted she was too busy on her day off; but being called in for actual surgery was another matter, even if she would be dealing with some odds and sods Guy would be too busy to manage. She had been planning on driving into town anyway, to drop Jason off at a talk at the library about aquatic life, which she supposed had started all of this discussion about things under the sea.  


“I could tell that was your daughter,” Jason declares, in a non sequitur aside from a lecture about the lifespan of a zebrafish, which itself seemed a non sequitur from a long diatribe about how overrated Sean Connery was. “You look very similar, apart from Elinor being a lot thinner and younger. Also she looked like an older version of the girl in the pictures on the wall, which makes sense because she  _is_  an older version of the girl in the pictures on the wall. Does she want to be a surgeon too?

“Ah. Well. No, she...” 

Serena realises she doesn’t know what Ellie wants to be, but then she decides that  _Ellie_  probably doesn’t know what Ellie wants to be.

“She’s still at university at the moment, but no, medicine wasn’t for her.”

Elinor  _could_  have got the grades, Serena thinks, but she was dead set against the career path both of her parents had chosen, and positively vocal in her rejection of the same. But what  _will_  Ellie do when she graduates? She makes a mental note to gently broach the topic of her future plans, and to have a catch-up generally with her daughter, later.

And it’s later, indeed, that Serena will think: _because you think there will always be a later, don’t you? There will always be another time._

But for now, she is dropping Jason off at his talk, and then she is driving to the hospital, not knowing what awaits her there, and not anticipating the many, the myriad ways in which her life will change in the coming hours and days, never mind future weeks and months, but, all the time, trusting that all that time will be available to her. And to all of them.

Serena arrives at Holby in time to see the army truck pulling up, and Raf and Ollie already waiting.

As the stretcher is pulled out, Serena sees that the soldier is in fact a woman, and she’s also roundabout Serena’s own age. She feels a slight surprise she knows she shouldn’t; women can be surgeons, of course. And soldiers. And anything else they please.

And Serena wonders again what Elinor wants to be, what she will do when she graduates.

Later, she will think: _how you just assumed she would graduate. How you thought the biggest problem would be Ellie choosing a career._

But that’s later. For now — and as always — there’s work to be getting on with, and patients to treat.

And still, it seems, no sign of Guy Self.

 


End file.
